1 Week Until The AP Spanish Exam!

Finally- the culminating moment of at least SIX YEARS is here! There is 1 week until the AP Spanish Exam! Your Spanish Language and Culture students are relying on you to prepare them well. They want those 6 college credits. Now what?

Review Week

When there is 1 week until the AP Spanish exam, I reserve each class period for review. I create a chart, and I add activities into each day so that students can work at their own pace.

Reviewing for the AP Spanish Exam might look different from year to year. There may be years when your students have really nailed the cultural comparison, so you don’t need to spend much time on that. But they have struggled with the combined print/audio MCQ section. So maybe you practice more of those. Here is the review chart I plan to use with my students this year. Though there are no actual exam activities linked in, I have provided the types of activities and which ones to use for the AP Spanish, Preparing for the Language and Culture Examination Workbook by José Diaz. These activities or activity numbers can easily be switched to match your source for practice.

Where To Find AP Spanish Test Prep Materials

Here are the ones I’ve used. I will list them and let you know what I find good and bad about them.

My top recommendation is the AP Spanish, Preparing for the Language and Culture Examination Workbook by José Diaz. I like this one a lot because it comes with an answer key book for teachers. This makes it really easy for me to correct my student’s work. It also provides the transcript to any audios. Last, their answer key is very accurate! One negative: it does not provide explanations for why one answer is right or wrong.
My next recommendation is the FREE sources we have access to on AP Classroom. You can pick and choose from lots and lots of activities. It will auto-correct the MCQ portions and show you how much time students spent on each activity. Another benefit is that it offers explanations about why certain answers are right or wrong! For me, the drawback of this website is that it’s not always easy for me to navigate. That might be a personal issue. Another thing is that you might have to keep track of anything you’ve already assigned earlier in the year.
I have also used the online and workbook version of the Temas Workbook. The Workbook is called AP Spanish Language and Culture Exam Preparation. One benefit to this book is that if your school buys the licenses, students can complete all of the activities online. That means multiple choice will be auto-graded! I also like the breakdown this book gives about scoring and timing for the different parts of the test, and strategies for each section. I do find these activities to be more difficult than the other workbook, and I have found examples of when the workbook and the online version can be different.
Last, Teachers Pay Teachers has a lot of wonderful resources created by our colleagues from their years of experience. I have purchased some to use with my students, and I have created some to share on that platform as well.

Quiz Your Students About the Exam

I have 3 different versions of this quiz, depending on what my students need, but I always give my students a quiz about the test. Do they know all the parts and how they are scored? Do they have strategies for success on each section? Do they know how much time they have to complete each section? What are the required elements of the open-ended responses?

Making sure they have a firm grasp on the format and scoring of the test eliminates stress and mistakes with timing or forgotten elements while they are taking the test. It can also serve as a little boost to their quarter grade and it’s a confidence builder right before they take the exam!

The Parts of the AP Spanish Exam